Reuters: ByteDance to Close Nuverse company that published Marvel Snap
The Chinese holding company ByteDance will restructure its gaming division. According to Reuters sources, during it, the company will close its largest gaming "daughter" of the publisher Nuverse.
According to Reuters, ByteDance should stop developing new games by December. She is also now deciding what to do with the games that have already been released. The only games that ByteDance will continue to deal with are games for TikTok and Douyin.
ByteDance is expected to officially announce the restructuring to employees on November 27. Several hundred people may be out of work due to the ByteDance decision.
Representatives of ByteDance in a comment to Reuters partially confirmed the information of the sources, but did not go into details.
"We regularly analyze our business and make adjustments to focus on the company's long-term strategic growth directions. After a recent review, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our gaming business," ByteDance said.
Nuverse was opened in 2019. She is best known for the Marvel Snap game, which was developed by Second Dinner, the studio of former Hearthstone game director Ben Brode. According to the AppMagic analytics platform, Marvel Snap is the most profitable collectible card game in 2023. Since January 1, she has earned $98.2 million from in-game purchases.
Earlier, ByteDance announced its global ambitions in the field of video games. In July 2021, the head of the gaming division, Yan Shou, told at a meeting with employees that ByteDance wants to compete not only with Chinese companies like Tencent and NetEase, but also with Western giants. According to him, ByteDance wanted to become "a global gaming company that can remain successful for decades."
However, in 2022, the ByteDance gaming division began to have problems. Amid financial difficulties, the company revised its business strategy in favor of the short video and e-commerce segments and began mass layoffs. There were rumors that she cut 80% of the staff of the gaming division at once, but ByteDance denied them. It is also known that ByteDance has dissolved the Shanghai 101 Studio.
Last week, Reuters reported that ByteDance is in talks to sell Moonton mobile studio, which developed the popular MOBA Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. It is not known who exactly she communicates with. Reuters sources claim that among the companies interested in the studio there is at least one from Saudi Arabia.
